The casual observer can be excused for being a bit confused by the on-going cable imbroglio at the FCC. Throw away your old-fashioned ideological assumptions about who should line up where — the players on this one have been as jumbled as a flight schedule on a holiday weekend. A Republican chairman of the FCC, with support from leftish activist groups and AT&T, is pushing for massive regulation. He is being challenged by fellow Republicans on the commission, as well as Republicans in Congress. Now comes one more voice against new cable regulation: Jesse Jackson’s.
That’s right. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the Rainbow Coalition, thinks FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is going too far:
“There is virtually no political support from either progressives or conservatives for such pet policies as a la carte pricing, which would raise prices for consumers and hurt most programmers, or for the various ‘leased-access’ programs that will squeeze out channel space for minority-owned programmers,” Jackson said in comments earlier this week.
“Rather than work through the democratic process in Congress, a bureaucratic agency should not be using a 20-year-old-legal clause to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers.”
And he’s right. Despite the rhetoric, regulation isn’t the friend of diversity — it more often suppresses it than fosters it.
Welcome to the deregulatory coalition, Rev. Jackson. You can sit over there, where Mr. Martin used to sit.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.